The new town of Winchelsea lacks the planning aesthetic of its more familiar post-war counterparts – there was little attention paid to neighbourhood and streetscape and it suffers from an unimaginative grid-like layout. But then it was developed long before Howard and Unwin were influential and initiated not by a benevolent development corporation but a reigning monarch – Edward I, back in 1288.

Spring Steps: a council estate

For all its failures of conception and design, it can’t be denied that the town has acquired a patina of age and attractiveness. Its brief prosperity as a trading port was over by the end of the 14th century and the town entered a long period of decline. By later Victorian times, however, its ‘unspoilt’ character was attracting artists and more affluent incomers and – as local housing became more valued for its picturesque qualities than its utility – the squeeze on the town’s working class began.

The struggle for affordable housing for working people was as fierce here as anywhere but ultimately some of the finest council housing in the country was built.

The Court hall, dating to the 13th century and used by Winchelsea Corporation since 1665

For us, this history begins in the 1920s. Battle Rural District Council had identified land on the outskirts of the town on Ferry Hill for council housing. Lady McIlwraith (a recent resident, the widow of a former premier of Queensland) eyed this land for building plans of her own but offered – with genuine benevolence, I believe – to build low rent housing nearer the centre of Winchelsea. (1)

A furore ensued in the pages of the Sussex Express, initiated by a letter from ‘A Lover of Winchelsea’ complaining of the chutzpah of this ‘sojourner…a stranger from the colonies’ who would ‘entirely efface the aspect of one of the central quarters’ of the town. Another correspondent feared (misguidedly, as the council’s plans had been dropped) the ‘common-place Corporation abominations’ which would emerge.

But middle-class philanthropy spoke out too. Constance Rawlinson (the honorary secretary of the local branch of the Soldiers, Sailors Airmen and Families Association) deplored recent social changes: (2)

a great number of labourers cottages in Winchelsea have been bought up by London and other town owners for weekend use – or even only for letting purposes during the summer months and many poor families have been turned out and finally driven away from their homes for want of houses.

Another correspondent, reminding us that the problem of key workers finding homes is nothing new, referred to ‘three persons in public service’ in poor housing in the town, including a district nurse forced to live in and work from a single room and an assistant teacher in a ‘tiny cottage’, both ‘sharing sanitary facilities’ with neighbours.

Hiham Bungalow, built as part of Lady Macilwraith’s housing scheme

The scheme went ahead and, largely hidden by surrounding walls, seems to have left Winchelsea relatively unscathed but the demand for working-class housing remained. In 1936, a survey of Salutation Cottages on Mill Road found five families (one of twelve) living in homes unfit for human habitation. To help rehouse them, Battle Rural District Council proposed a development on Mill Field to the east of the town.

Though supported by the Parish Council and pressing need, this modest plan for six council houses aroused fierce opposition. William Maclean Homan, the town’s historian, argued it would cause Winchelsea to become a ‘third-rate modern village’. He favoured, instead, a proposal to build private rented housing on low-lying land away from the town at the bottom of the hill on a site rejected by the Council because of its poor drainage. (3)

The Corporation of Winchelsea (a ceremonial hang-over of unreformed governance preserved to honour the town’s status as a Cinque Port) organised a petition of the local great and the good to oppose the scheme. It drew a caustic response from the clerk of the Council who observed the petition did ‘not appear to be very representative of all classes as, indeed, all the signatures appear to be those of sixteen of the more cultured and leisured residents and in four cases of their wives’.

We’ll overlook the gender politics here to examine that of class, stated even more clearly by Mr W Creasey in his letter to the Sussex Express which followed:

I am going to voice my opinion and the opinion of the working classes, the majority of whom cannot for fear of intimidation. You, Mr Homan, like others, have come to Winchelsea, bought a few working men’s cottages, and tried to make them look old-fashioned inside, adding modern bathrooms and electrical devices for your comfort, and enabling you to let to others.

You have stated that the working class are not wanted on the hill of Winchelsea, but if you had no-one to cook your food or do anything for you, you would experience difficulties. Yet you would deny them the right to live in decent healthy surroundings.

Gentrification was alive and well in Winchester. If you feel any lingering sympathy for Mr Homan’s attempts to preserve the pristine beauty of old town, this extract (from an unpublished history of Winchelsea he wrote some time later) demonstrates he was clearing capable of upholding his own side of the class struggle:

About ten years ago a determined attempt, without any justification, was made to build in Winchelsea half a dozen council houses. Fortunately for the town this evil scheme was defeated though it had the support of some inhabitants who saw a chance of getting cheap houses at the neighbourhood’s expense.

A survey by Battle Rural District Council in 1946 allows us to glimpse these parasites so keen to benefit from their neighbours’ largesse: a cook, a mechanic, a farm labourer, several building workers and so on – then, as now, hard-working families whose relative poverty made necessary some support from their wider community.

That year, the Council took out a compulsory purchase order on a little under one acre of former allotment land at the north-east corner of the town and here, at Spring Steps, it built Winchelsea’s first council housing. The four flats and four houses were occupied at the end of 1949.

What that could mean is made clear by this recollection from the very first tenant of the estate, Eric Streeton, a member of one of the families who had previously lived in Salutation Cottages: (4)

What luxury this new council house was, we were the first new tenants of Spring Steps. There was an upstairs toilet and a downstairs toilet, there was a proper bathroom, bedrooms with fireplaces in them. Hot water heated by a back boiler in the living room fireplace. A sitting room which was only used on high days and holidays. Our own front and back door, no shared access. A larder with slate shelves to keep things cool. The icing on the cake was our very own garden, not a back yard, a proper garden.

Council housing made possible for Winchelsea’s working class the kind of homes that its more affluent residents had long taken for granted.

Spring Steps

Moreover, these homes were very far from being ‘common-place Corporation abominations’. Spring Steps is perhaps one of the most attractive council estates I’ve come across. It’s a mix of rendered and red-brick, pantiled, bay-windowed and gabled homes but it was something more than an ‘in-keeping’ simulacrum of Sussex vernacular and rather a genuine contribution to the look and the life of the town.

Trojan’s Plat

With the wind in its sails, the Council’s next development, on Trojan’s Plat at the other end of town, would be a more daring and modern addition to the townscape. The estate comprises 12 houses of white painted brick, softened by careful placement and landscaping and by brown-tiled roofs, gable ends and porches (and by the additional stipulation that television aerials be placed on poles in the back gardens).

Trojan’s Plat and the entrance to Jew’s Hall on Back Lane

The estate also features what must be the oldest garden gate of any council scheme in the country. At the end of the Back Lane terrace you can see the arched entrance which formerly led to a medieval building known as Trojan’s or Jew’s Hall.

Trojan’s Plat

The estate, designed by local architect AH Neave, deservedly won an award from the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1954 as among the best-designed council estates in the country. Seven years later when the Sir William Holford, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, summarised the ‘quiet revolution…largely social in origin’ that had occurred in the last two decades, he picked out this scheme at Winchelsea (and here it took its place alongside Churchill Gardens in Westminster and the Lansbury Estate in Poplar) as an exemplar:(5)

New domestic architecture has become almost classless. The old stigma of what we called ‘council housing’ has disappeared.

That unfortunately would prove to be a premature conclusion but it marks the idealism of the age and the ambition of Labour’s 1949 Housing Act which removed the stipulation that council housing provide homes only for the working class – an embodiment of Nye Bevan’s vision to:

introduce in our modern villages and towns what was always the lovely feature of English and Welsh villages, where the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the…labourer all lived in the same street. I believe that is essential for the full life of a citizen…to see the living tapestry of a mixed community.

Mr Homan had been vanquished – temporarily at least.

In the present, however, Right to Buy has wreaked its havoc and at least three of the four Spring Steps’ houses and one of the flats are privately owned and – irony of ironies – one of the Trojan’s Plats houses is a holiday let. (6) No doubt, homes in Winchelsea – as in many other attractive rural locations – are as beyond the reach of many of the locals now as they were back in the interwar period but we have gone backwards in our present rejection of council housing, the most cost-effective remedy to this problem.

For all my tongue in cheek opening, Winchelsea is a beautiful village (an ‘Antient Town’ only by reason of its early incorporation and long history) and well worth a visit. If you go to sight-see, enjoy it but don’t neglect the two more modern additions shown in the amended map – you’ll understand their historic significance and appreciate their architecture too.

They remind us both of the need (then as now) for genuinely affordable and good quality housing for ordinary people and the heights to which council housing has reached in fulfilment of that need.

Sources

(1) Malcolm Pratt, Winchelsea, a Port of Stranded Pride (1998). Other details and quotations, unless otherwise attributed, come from the same source. I’m grateful to Mr Pratt for providing a local history which provides full information on this usually neglected topic.

(2) The reference to ‘Corporation homes’ is from the Sussex Express, 15 January 1922, Ms Rawlinson’s letter and the quotations which follow from the edition of 8 January 1926.

(3) Sussex Express, 26 June 1936. The riposte which follows from W Creasey can be found in the edition of 3 July 1936

(4) Eric Streeton, Life and Community in Winchelsea in the 1950s, typescript manuscript in Winchelsea Court Hall Museum

Like this:

If the St Giles’ Estate in Lincoln discussed in last week’s post can be taken as a quintessential example of the council-built cottage suburbs that dominated the interwar period, the Ermine Estate in the same city stands out as a superb exemplar of the social democratic ideals of the post-war era. It remains, in the words of Jones the Planner, ‘social housing as it was meant to be, and it has survived for fifty years, not pristine, but evidently a place that works’. (1)

The ambition and broad consensus which had propelled Lincoln’s impressive interwar council building record was maintained into the war. As early as 1943, when central government’s eyes first turned toward the fruits of victory and a new housing programme, Lincoln had a 341 house scheme ready. In the following year, such was the urgency – the housing waiting list stood at 1054 – the Council requested 250 prefabricated homes from Government. (It would be granted 100, placed predominantly along Outer Circle Drive on the St Giles Estate.)

A further indication of the depth of the housing crisis came in 1946 when the waiting list exceeded 3000. Squatters took over unoccupied War Department property and received support from the then Labour-controlled council which laid on essential services. (2)

The supply of new housing in this era of genuine austerity and at a time of severe shortages of labour and materials began more slowly but had taken off by 1948 when 212 houses were put out to contract and 463 completions expected. The Hartsholme Estate to the south-west of the city – 700 homes in total and the Council’s first major post-war scheme was begun the following year.

A ‘village green’ on the Ermine West Estate

From 1947 to 1956, the Council was in Independent and Conservative control but the drive to build persisted. The City’s 1000th postwar council home was opened in 1951 and at peak, in 1953, Lincoln completed 636 houses in a single year. In 1957 it proposed to build 700. As its chair of Housing, Dr CA Lillicrap had stated three years earlier:

he could not answer for the national policy, but only for Lincoln, where they were building as many houses as they were permitted to.

Interestingly, a large majority of these were for general needs. The Council resisted the Conservative government’s emphasis on slum clearance (though that too was a pressing necessity and the city itself would demolish 470 slums by 1960) and remained intent on building for general needs. It was Lillicrap again who articulated the position:

there was going to be a temptation to build more houses for slum clearance because of the greater subsidy, but he was certain they would safeguard in all justice the interests of those on the waiting list.

I don’t need to labour the point that this was a centre-right council recognising both the duty and necessity of providing directly – where clearly private enterprise had failed – decent and affordable housing for its people.

Apartments on Ermine East

It was the Ermine Estate, begun in 1952 and completed in the early 1960s, that was the City’s showpiece. Initial plans for the Riseholme Estate (as it was originally called) envisaged a total of 1350 homes – 1050 on what would become Ermine East, lying to the east of Riseholme Road and some 300 on Ermine West on the other side. (3) There would be later additions, notably Trent View, the 17-storey tower block (one of three in Lincoln) built in Ermine West in 1964. At present, the combined estates form almost ten per cent of Lincoln’s built-up area.

Trent View, Ermine West

The overall estate will be unremarkable to most and (with one possible exception to be noted) will not feature on many tourist itineraries but it does – alongside many of the other ‘anonymous’ council estates this blog tries to record – capture a significant and, I would argue, precious moment in our history. Let’s rewrite our ‘island story’ and celebrate its more progressive and democratic ideals. (4)

The basic housing forms of the two estates are similar. There are examples of prefabricated housing – a hoped-for method of building rapidly and at scale in the fifties – on both estates. ‘Cornish houses’ with their distinct mansard roofs (which saved on the costs of concrete) can be seen on Edendale Gardens in the west and Broxholme Gardens in the east.

‘Cornish houses’, Edendale Gardens, Ermine West

But most of the homes are low density, red or yellow brick two-storey houses, semi-detached or in short terraces, all with decent-sized front and back gardens. Bungalows and three-storey apartment blocks add to the range. The prevailing style is fifties Modernist ‘with strong geometric shapes and little decorative detailing on façades’ with the odd example of brick patterning on some of the apartment blocks. (5)

Ermine West

These were solid and well-equipped homes with an unassuming but, to my eyes, attractive aesthetic. The estates’ landscaping provides the context in which this modest housing flourishes. Here the two estates differ slightly. Ermine East is characterised by a number of long, curving roads; in Ermine West the cul-de-sac is the predominant form. On both estates, houses are set back behind wide verges and tree-lined footpaths and both are interspersed with open spaces and ‘village greens’.

If all this works, why does it work? For one, there was a determined effort to make it work. Here – and this seems a recurring theme in Lincoln – the Church was ‘an essential agent in the fostering of a sense of identity’ among the new residents. (6)

The combined Anglican church and community centre were the first public buildings opened (on Ermine East) in 1956 and the church was determined from the outset to forge a sense of community on the new estate. This view of its role – a genuinely ecumenical and outward-looking one – was embodied in its newsletter, the Ermine News, published monthly from 1957 to 1965.

It contained, not unreasonably, regular articles on Christian faith and Church activities but is most striking for its coverage and support of the Estate’s wider community life – the Lincoln Imp pub ladies’ darts team, local football teams, the Evergreen Club for older residents, youth groups and activities, fetes, beauty contests, dances, flower shows and so on…

In January 1957 with 1350 homes built (another 600 projected) and a population of 5000 in an article headlined significantly ‘Estate or Town?’, the News called for more shops, essential for giving ‘a homely atmosphere and building up a sense of neighbourhood and belonging’: (7)

The responsible authorities are to be congratulated for building a very fine estate. BUT THERE IS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT. A comfortable house, a garden and plenty of open space aren’t enough in themselves. The greatest danger is loneliness.

An article the following year concluded ‘Let’s drop “Estate” altogether and become the neighbourhood of Ermine, Lincoln’.

Shops on Woodhall Drive, Ermine East, with thanks to Jones the Planner

In 1963, the population of the Estate stood at 10,000, of whom just 160 families were regular attendees of the Anglican Church. Nevertheless, it does appear to have played a wider and a valued role in the community it had helped create. And the new and now Grade II*- listed church it opened in 1963, designed by Sam Scorer, was to be a symbol of this – a ‘Tent of Meeting, rather than a static temple’. As the Reverend John Hodgkinson stated, ‘the emphasis was very much on church as people rather than a building’. (9)

Still, it was a very striking building, beautifully rather than starkly functional in form and design – a fine space enclosed within its most notable feature, ‘a gracefully sweeping, tent-like, concrete roof’ – technically a ‘hyperbolic paraboloid’ constructed in consultation with the structural engineer, Hajnal Konyi.

It may not be municipal but it’s certainly a dream and it’s good to see a council estate given grace and dignity by architecture of this quality. As Owen Hatherley argues, ‘the estate is determinedly mild and moderate, far from the avant-garde; its parish church is quite the opposite’. (8)

The Ermine Estate library, from the June 1963 issue of the Ermine News

The ‘elegant little public library’ (Hatherley again), opened in 1962, also seems to have acquired a secure place in the heart of its community. The Ermine News reports a ‘police-controlled queue’ and 1800 books borrowed in the first three hours of its opening. By 1963, 3500 adult readers and over 2000 children were registered users. It’s hard not to be nostalgic for a time when libraries were so widely valued – though their value remains inestimable to the present.

The Ermine Estate was a working-class suburb; in fact, one which (according to Andrew HJ Jackson) prefigured the many private estates which would follow. This won’t please the urbanist Hatherley but it’s an undeniably pleasant environment and even he grudgingly praises its homes as ‘uncontroversial but decent, often with well-trimmed and maintained public greenery around’. (8) Jones the Planner concludes that ‘Lincoln clearly did something right at Ermine – like manage and maintain it’.

The Ermine Estate, with thanks to Jones the Planner

If you research the present Estate, you’ll find it contains pockets of deprivation ranking amongst the most severe in the country (9) and the usual suspects can be found describing it in the usual pejorative terms as a place – as a council estate (‘nuff said) – to avoid. But the appearance of the estate belies these criticisms and the estate website continues to record an active and vibrant community.

I’ll leave the last word with Jones the Planner who finds it an ‘uplifting, miraculous place’:

you might say, much like any other low rise council estate of that era …except that Ermine still works: there are no signs of vandalism or anti-social behaviour, no graffiti, no Alice Coleman interventions and, can you believe it, no security cameras.

It is, as he says, ‘social democracy in action’, built – when that consensus reigned – at a time when the state was understood as an imperfectly but always potentially and necessary benevolent force, in the days before we sold our soul to the market and its apologists.

(2) This and the following detail is drawn from Owen Hartley, Housing Policy in Four Lincolnshire Towns, 1919-1959, University of Oxford PhD 1969

(3) City of Lincoln, Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, Development Plan (1953)

(4) English Heritage made a modest start to this process in the article by David Walsh, ‘Post-war Suburbs and the New Urbanism: Lincoln’s Ermine Estates’, in its Conservation Bulletin, Issue 56, Autumn 2007. The City of Lincoln Townscape Assessments covering these and other estates in the city also mark a welcome recognition of this important history.

The City of Lincoln offers an interesting case study of the early drive to build affordable housing for working people. Back then this was almost universally understood to be, of necessity, council housing, and the drive to build came – admittedly with political flavouring and different degrees of intensity – from all parties. There was also significant influence from local pressure groups, generally not radical in politics but sharing a common belief in the duty of the local state to house those in need. The manifestos of nearly all major political parties in the last election show how far we have come from those heady days.

Chaucer Drive, St Giles Estate

That pressure began before the First World War. A Public Welfare Committee and composed of ‘clergy and ministers of several denominations, laymen of various political beliefs, and ladies with experience amongst poorer citizens’ was formed in Lincoln in 1912. (1) Convinced of the need of ‘building and the wise employment of the Town Planning Act by the City Authorities’, it lobbied first the Council and then, having achieved no satisfactory response, the Local Government Board.

This prompted a letter from the LGB to Lincoln enquiring of their plans which was sufficient, in January 1913, to provoke the Council to form a Housing and Town Planning Committee. Elections later that year which returned Lincoln’s first Labour councillor, RA Taylor (he became the city’s first Labour MP in 1924), added to the pressure.

In December 1913, 60 acres was purchased in ‘Uphill Lincoln’ on the escarpment north of the River Witham. A public enquiry followed with contending petitions – one of 600 signatures presented by the local Trades and Labour Council in favour of council housing; another, from local builders and property owners of 366 signatures, against. (2)

The Council’s view was presented by the Town Clerk, Mr Bagshaw: ‘If private enterprise did not meet the need then he thought the Corporation was satisfied that it was their duty to provide the houses themselves’. Even this qualified approval was tempered by what he noted as the ‘considerable reluctance of the Council…to embark on a scheme of that sort’

In August 1914 – inauspicious timing – a government loan was approved. The war put paid to the plans but, revived and dusted off, they would form the basis of Lincoln’s major housing scheme after the First World War.

In the meantime, the war itself added to the demand to build in Lincoln, not a sleepy cathedral city but an important engineering and munitions centre. Again, an unlikely coalition of forces would combine to press for action.

In 1917 (in response to the Local Government Board circular requesting councils to detail post-war building plans), the Council reported a permanent increase of population of 5000 and the need for at least 1500 new homes. The local Labour movement and the city’s Employers’ Association jointly pressed for urgent action and delegates from each were seconded to a new Housing Advisory Committee formed by the City Council.

By October 1918, the Council had been persuaded:

subject to satisfactory financial arrangements being made with the Government, [to] undertake, as the necessity arises, to provide adequate housing accommodation for the working class population of the city.

This was an unwittingly radical position perhaps but one which marks the temper of the times. Opposition Conservatives were left complaining about ‘the pressure brought by the Independent Labour Party in collusion with one of the large works’. (This was Ruston and Hornsby whose director, Colonel JS Ruston would play a leading role in another housing initiative we’ll examine later.)

Wragby Road, St Giles Estate

This pressure persuaded the Ministry of Munitions to agree to the construction of 300 houses on the Wragby Road land previously purchased by the Council. In the end, the 196 houses built were not completed until 1920 and were later sold to a property company and then on to sitting tenants. The whole scheme proved highly controversial. There were complaints about poor workmanship and high rents – at between 11s 6d and 12s exclusive of rates they were beyond the reach of most working men – which led to a six-month rent strike in 1921. (3)

St Giles Estate

They were to form, nevertheless, the anchor for the Council’s larger and more successful scheme on the remaining land: what became the St Giles’ Estate, designed by the City’s newly appointed architectural assistant Alfred Hill. The Council built 234 homes under the generous 1919 Housing Act. These ‘Addison houses’, in short terraces or semi-detached along parts of Wragby Road and Chaucer Drive, are distinguished by their Arts and Crafts detailing, rendering and generous plots. (The Estate also features an Addison Drive in commemoration of this most ambitious of interwar Housing ministers.)

St Giles Estate street view

Later phases, built as economy measures kicked in, are plainer and have smaller gardens but the Estate as a whole is an archetypal garden suburb of the interwar period, marked by its ‘softly geometrical road network’ and cul-de-sacs, quadrangles and circus. (4) Wide verges and now mature trees, small greens and corner setbacks complete the ensemble. Some original privet hedges survive to mark the plot boundaries.

A 1933 plan of the Estate showed plots for 1302 houses, some already built, some projected. Prefabricated bungalows in the mid-1940s and later infill would complete the Estate. (5)

To see the full flowering of Arts and Crafts principles, we can go the smaller Swanpool Estate to the south of the city. In the end, only 113 houses were built of the 2200 originally projected when Colonel Ruston formed the Swanpool Cooperative Housing Association in 1919. The Society’s committee comprised working men and employers and other ‘representative gentlemen’ and stipulated that all tenants were to be shareholders with an unusually low minimum stake of £5.

An early photograph of the Swanpool Estate

Despite (or perhaps because of) these high ideals, the finances of the scheme – widely praised in the contemporary town planning press and still an attractive locale – were never viable and it was wound up to a limited company and its properties gradually sold to existing tenants in 1925.

Corner of Almond Avenue and Skellingthorpe Road, Swanpool Estate

It’s hard (to me at least) not to see a case made here for the necessity of state action and one that was reinforced by the Council’s increasing reliance on direct labour for its own building programme. The Council, in predominantly Conservative hands, until 1933 had been alarmed by the construction shortfalls of the privately contracted Ministry of Munitions scheme and increasingly frustrated by the high costs and perceived obstructiveness of the local Master Builders’ Association.

Houses with modern rendering on the St Giles Estate

In 1924, assured by the City Engineer that the Council could build cheaper and better itself, ten houses, then 50, were built by direct labour. Under Labour control from 1933 to 1937, the Council would use direct labour more widely – in 1935, the City’s 1000th house built by direct labour was opened.

The other, growing theme of interwar housing is that of slum clearance and here again Lincoln took an innovative role and, once more, external pressure played a significant part. Lincoln had many slums in its central district but the Council’s good intentions to clear them and rehouse their tenants were thwarted by council house rents unaffordable to the displaced.

The members of the Newlands Congregational Church felt the problem was ‘a matter for unified effort by all Christian people’. A public meeting, ‘attended by every local notable’ according to Owen Hartley, was called in June 1928 and a Voluntary Slum Clearance Committee formed which promised to provide a £70 grant for every Council home built to replace slum housing. This would bring rents down, it was reckoned, to a highly affordable 6s 6d inclusive of rates.

Some £5320 were raised and 76 houses built under the aegis of the scheme – a surplus being donated to provide new furniture to those being moved. It was a modest beginning but one that placed Lincoln at the forefront of early attempts to solve the problem of slum housing.

Lamb Gardens, St Giles Estate

Those efforts were to falter in the early thirties as more conservative voices – who believed slum clearance was ‘a vicious attack on property owners’ and direct labour a ‘dice loaded against contractors’ – on the Council grew stronger. To Labour alderman JW Rayment, this faction ‘thought that economy could be effected by spending no money and providing no work and that someone would bring prosperity to the country’.

This early critic of austerity would find his position strengthened by the determination of central government to tackle the slum problem from 1930 and his party’s growing strength on the Council. The City’s Skellingthorpe Estate was begun in 1929. A small slum clearance scheme – demolishing just 32 houses – was pushed through in 1932 but by 1937, 454 homes in the city’s most notorious slum area, the Drapery, had been cleared.

Scott Gardens, St Giles Estate

In broad outline, the city offers a representative view of the principal dynamics of interwar housing policy and priorities. It demonstrates too the broad – and largely cross-party – consensus which recognised (more or less willingly) the vital role of the state in providing housing.

Lincoln is distinct in what Hartley describes as the ‘political style of the city’: ‘civic decorum and a strong moralistic flavour’ infused with ‘mild progressivism’. And unusual in the influence wielded by outside, often religiously motivated, pressure groups.

Then the practical, economic and moral case for public housing seemed obvious to a wide cross-section of opinion; nowadays – apparently – less so but perhaps that reflects a too craven acceptance of the market and its iron laws by our politicians, many of whom should know better.

Sources

(1) From the Lincoln Leader, 12 October 1912 quoted in Owen Hartley, Housing Policy in Four Lincolnshire Towns, 1919-1959, University of Oxford PhD 1969. Other detail and quotations which follow are drawn from the same source.

(2) Sally Scott, ‘The Early Days of Planning’ in Dennis R Mills (ed), Twentieth Century Lincolnshire, History of Lincolnshire Committee, Lincoln (1989)

Like this:

Maybe only its biggest fans would claim that the town hall and civic complex at Tunbridge Wells make a truly beautiful ensemble but they do possess a striking dignity and presence. Above all, they tell the story of our civic culture’s rise and fall, from a time when once local government stood proudly at the heart of its community to the present when it seems we must live in thrall to the market and its values.

You wouldn’t expect to look to Royal Tunbridge Wells – that descriptor is important to some of its citizens – as a prime exemplar of municipal progress but, in fact, the town is a good example of the growth of local government’s functions and status. The town grew rapidly in the first half of the 19th century and, typically, acquired the trappings of necessary self-government – initially the ‘night-watchman’ duties of policing and rudimentary sanitation – in 1835. By the end of the century, the town’s population was approaching 30,000 and in 1889, these Town Commissioners applied for incorporation as a Municipal Borough.

Technical Institute, now the Adult Education Centre

The new councillors were conscious of their civic duties. Public baths (demolished in 1974) were opened on Monson Road in 1898, a Technical School (built by the Council, administered by the County Council) opened four years later. But the town hall – an adapted market hall – was makeshift. Only belatedly, in 1928, did the Council acquire land on Calverley Terrace for new municipal buildings worthy of its role.

Although the town’s first scheme (submitted in 1931 and designed by the architect Vincent Harris in fairly standard neo-Georgian style) was scuppered by the Ministry of Health’s refusal of borrowing powers, this was an opportune moment – an era when the expanding functions of local government were justifying a new heyday of civic architecture.

In the later 1930s, economic recovery and increased spending allowed Tunbridge Wells – and other authorities – to revisit their building plans. But the Council remained cautious: the architectural competition announced in 1934 stipulated that the entire scheme should cost no more than £120,000 and achieve dignity ‘without elaborate or unnecessary features’. (1) In this, however, the conservative burghers of Tunbridge Wells were in accord – unwittingly perhaps – with the modernist functionalism coming into vogue.

The winning entry was submitted by the architectural partnership of Percy Thomas and Ernest Prestwich. (Thomas would also design the Swansea Guildhall and Swinton and Pendlebury Town Hall – now the Salford Civic Centre.) It conformed to a still prevailing neo-Georgian aesthetic but in a stripped-down form reflecting a contemporary transition to more modernist forms.

Compared to the path-breaking schemes of the same period at Hornsey and Poplar, for example, it is, according to Architectural History Practice, ‘a weaker design in an outdated style’ but to municipal dreamers it is impressive, not architecturally perhaps but certainly through the civic ambition it marks.

Town Hall main entrance

Town Hall Council Chamber

The centrepiece of the complex is, appropriately, the town hall itself, its main entrance occupying a commanding hilltop and corner position, flanked by municipal offices on each side. It was opened, with little fanfare at a time when more pressing matters occupied national attention, in 1941. The overall scheme is faced in brown brick laid in Flemish bond with dressings of Portland stone. The sash windows are traditional Georgian. There’s a light-touch Art Deco in some of the external fittings; it can be seen more opulently internally.

To the right-hand side, lies the Assembly Hall, the first component opened to the public, in 1939. It’s of similar style but distinguished by three carved stone reliefs representing Dance, Drama and Music – a nod to the gaiety and culture within its portals.

Further right lay the police station and courtroom. The interior has a number of Art Deco features; the main entrance boasts an impressive carved stone relief above (created – like the Assembly Hall reliefs – by Gilbert Seale and Sons of Camberwell) representing the majesty of the law and the administration of justice and including, in this case very aptly, the town’s motto ‘Do Well Doubt Not’.

Back around to the left, fronting Mount Pleasant Road but like the ensemble as a whole located on the newly-created thoroughfare Civic Way, is the Borough’s relocated Library and Museum, its construction halted during the war and not finally opened until 1952.

It is, in all, a commanding presence at the very heart of the town – a signifier of the authority and service of the local authority within its community – and one that might deserve respect. The buildings were Grade II listed in 1995.

Naturally, therefore, in 2008 it suggested that the complex – now seen by some as a ‘barrier’ between the top and bottom ends of the town rather than as a buckle joining the two – might be ‘regenerated’ and the Council formed the Tunbridge Wells Regeneration Company (a ‘local authority asset backed vehicle’ – the terminology perhaps tells you all you need to know) with the developers John Laing. (2)

The plan was relatively straight forward. A joint 50/50 partnership it was set up to bring forward civic, retail, commercial, community or residential property opportunities by redeveloping or regenerating assets in the council’s portfolio.

The Council claimed that the buildings were no longer fit for purpose – and they did, of course, require modernisation and upgrading – and suggested it might move to a recently vacated office site on the outskirts of town. What was needed in the centre was a revamped shopping precinct.

The local civic activists were – and, as they adopted the term themselves, I’ll lapse into the expected cliché – ‘disgusted’: (3)

The philosophy that apparently underpins the scheme should be of concern to us all: that shopping and shopping alone is all that is required to make a successful town centre. As libraries, education centres and assembly rooms don’t offer significant commercial value, they should be ‘regenerated’ and replaced by chain stores.

I don’t suppose – although I might be doing it an injustice – that the Royal Tunbridge Wells Civic Society is a politically radical body but, in this, it might (and I hope it does) speak for a much broader section of the population disquieted by a current politics which trashes ideals of public service and reduces everything to money and the market.

The commercialisation of the NHS, the marketisation of education, the financialisation of housing, the sale of public assets, the privatisation of public functions to an oligopoly of large private contractors…a world, in short, which knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

But here, it appears – unlikely though it may seem – that the citizens of Tunbridge Wells have begun a successful fight-back. Popular opposition and a palace coup removed an unpopular Tory Council leader in 2010 and a more refined – and more civic option – has emerged.

A study commissioned by Tunbridge Wells Borough Council and English Heritage has mooted ideas that might provide a regeneration worthy of the name – a new civic square, for example, and a ‘cultural hub’ based on the Library, Museum, Art Gallery and Adult Education Centre. (4)

Town Hall main entrance with Assembly Hall and Police Station to the right

There remains concern that current proposals don’t include the Town Hall and Assembly Hall. Both are listed, both – particularly the latter – are in need of modernisation. The temptation to gut them and adapt them for some commercial purpose is strong. The Civic Society has produced its own imaginative suggestions to retain the space for public use and value. (5)

If you visit Tunbridge Wells, you’ll naturally want to see the town’s beautiful Georgian centre in all its historic splendour but do take a walk up the hill to view the town’s proud Civic Complex. It represents a more democratic and progressive history and one which we must ensure does not become ‘merely’ historic.

Sources

(1) Quoted in Architectural History Practice, ‘Conservation Statement: Tunbridge Wells Civic Complex’ (ND). Most of the historical and descriptive detail of this post is drawn from this source which also contains an excellent overview of the civic architecture of the period.

Birmingham’s torrid love affair with high-rise was ending by the late sixties. The city built 464 high-rise blocks in the post-war period, the last of these on the Chelmsley Wood estate built between 1965 and 1972. But though the 35 blocks on the Estate can appear dominating, in fact 85 per cent of its 14,000 homes were low-rise houses and maisonettes. A critical turning-point had been reached.

That was more obvious in May 1986 when Grantham and Fleetwood Houses in Northfield became the first of the Council’s tower blocks to be demolished. By 2001 just 305 blocks remained in Council ownership; many had been rased, the Chelmsley Wood blocks transferred to Solihull. The demolition programme continues – another eight blocks were scheduled by the Council for clearance in 2011.

You could write a book on ‘the failure of high-rise’ and many have. This post will attempt a fresh and critical look at the arguments taking the experience of Birmingham as its guide.

Initially and surprisingly to some no doubt, it might be argued that high-rise blocks were a victim of their own success. Writing in 1974, Anthony Sutcliffe could claim that the city’s ‘overall housing shortage [was] virtually solved by the later 1960s’ – the ‘municipal flat had done its job of replacing the back-to-back house’. (1)

For the Birmingham Housing Department, this was a silver lining with a cloud. The difficulty it faced was that it gave those on the waiting list an element of choice – and they rarely chose high-rise. As far back as 1958, the City’s Housing Manager had admitted that 80 per cent of tenants preferred a house to a flat.

From the later 1960s, the completion of new estates at Chelmsley Wood, Frankley and Hawkesley provided a large amount of low-rise accommodation. As one housing officer recalls:

I remember the panic [in the Housing Department] when that happened. All of a sudden as those three estates came in there were whole swathes of empty dwellings that we struggled to get let and we did get them let, but it was a constant grind. The voids were always there.

In the earlier days of the rehousing programme, Birmingham’s housing managers had placed those prospective tenants judged least ‘respectable’ in council-owned slum housing awaiting redevelopment. Now more vulnerable tenants – precisely those whose needs pre-empted the choice that others were able to exercise – were placed in the unpopular tower blocks.

‘Residualisation’ had begun: a process by which council housing came increasingly to cater for troubled families. It was a process, moreover, which left the less favoured high-rise developments disproportionately affected by the social problems of both their residents and wider society.

Problems – and a powerful perception – of anti-social behaviour (most commonly on high-rise schemes) grew at around the same time. The Housing Committee grappled with the issues of ‘hooliganism’ and vandalism from early 1970s with little success. Arguably, its actions exacerbated the problem.

In the mid-seventies, the Council halted door-to-door rent collection and recruitment difficulties led a system of resident caretakers to be replaced by area teams. There are many council house tenants who blame this loss of contact and supervision for the rise of anti-social behaviour which coincided.

Of course, correlation does not mean causation but it’s telling how many later estate regeneration efforts have attempted precisely to replicate these lost systems of authority and surveillance through their use of concierges and CCTV. In Birmingham, the first CCTV systems on estates were introduced in 1984 and concierges from 1987.

Let’s turn to what many have seen as the more systemic problems of high-rise schemes.

We can begin, uncontroversially, by acknowledging a conceptual flaw in the ‘mixed development’ planning theory that did so much to license the growth of high-rise from the fifties and particularly so in Birmingham. Mixed development urged that councils build a range of housing forms – flats, maisonettes and houses – at a range of heights.

The intention was to fulfil a design aesthetic which overcame the monotony of traditional forms of working-class housing – both private terraced housing and council ‘cottage estates’ – but aimed, more significantly, to provide housing appropriate to a range of people and family units in different life stages. A good idea but one which could only work if council tenants were continually on the move as their life circumstances changed. This, of course, was neither feasible administratively nor desired by tenants who wished to remain in established homes.

This argument can be reduced to a more simple formulation (as it is by high-rise’s most vehement critics) that multi-storey schemes were unsuited to young families. That, of course, was where Birmingham started – its very first high-rise schemes were intended for single adults – but that founding principle was soon lost in the rush to rebuild and rehouse as high-rise construction took off.

The City has attempted to reverse this trend from 1970 (when families in flats with young children were given priority for transfer) but Right to Buy and the reduction of housing stock has made the full implementation of the policy increasingly difficult.

A ‘common sense’ view that high-rise housing is inappropriate for young children is hard to argue with and the counter-argument that families in Scotland and Continental Europe seem to cope well enough with flats is rather perhaps evidence of the cultural rootedness and intractability of this form of thinking in England – and of the futility of resistance to it.

Other conventional criticisms of high-rise – addressed, plaintively, by Glendinning and Muthesius in their important book on the topic – might be challenged, however. (3) For one, there is the largely unquestioned assumption that high-rise destroyed communities and, indeed, community itself. Carl Chinn’s observation is representative: (4)

Neighbourliness had to evolve; it was a gradual process based on daily contact, local knowledge and informal meetings. Living in flats made these day-to-day occurrences more difficult. They prevented the emergence of a true neighbourhood based on neighbours who were aware of each other. Residents felt isolated in their flats, cut off from their fellow tenants by a lack of unofficial meeting places. The street and its extensions had been the pivot of working-class life in Birmingham’s poorer neighbourhoods.

It’s a compelling case made by Birmingham’s foremost contemporary historian – and, of course, he takes care to record the squalor of the slums and improved living standards of post-war housing.

Still, we might be ready now to take a slightly more nuanced view. The Block Capital project in the neighbouring Black Country offers a more complicated tale of the successes and failures of high-rise and tells of the range of experiences – positive and negative – of those who lived in them. (5)

Other oral histories or just the informal stuff of Facebook reveal affection for some of the blocks and the existence of genuine community feeling. And estates up and down the country facing the threat of regeneration (as, sadly, it has become a threat in too many cases) also testify to the reality and resilience of community.

But then ‘community’ has generally deserved the scare quotes, not a neutral concept but an element in ideological struggle – variously used to condemn or defend the slum working-class and to ‘improve’ or lament the new working class of the council estates.

In this context, attitudes to high-rise itself should also be understood as ideological – initially as a deliberate Modernist and modernising manifestation of Welfare State reformism and progress and, latterly, as a target of generally conservative opposition to the same.

It’s hard not to see what became the most powerful attack on council housing in general and multi-storey council housing in particular – the defensible space thesis – in this context. It blamed both the nature of public housing – as neither literally or psychologically ‘owned’ – and the form of modern high-rise – its spaces encouraged and facilitated crime – for the rise of anti-social behaviour. It ignored any wider social or economic context and neglected to record similar problems occurring on a range of very different estates.

Alice Coleman, the British guru of ‘defensible space’ and Thatcher adviser, got to experiment in Birmingham in 1989 when her Design Improvement Controlled Experiment team renovated – it knocked down a tower block and some maisonette blocks and added a village green – the Nazareth Estate in Longbridge to some local bemusement. It wasn’t considered a ‘bad’ estate and the fact that the City Council was busy handing out ASBOs in 2005 suggests that something more than design might be responsible for youth offending. (6)

Finally, and on more objective ground, the final nail in the coffin of high-rise came dramatically with the collapse of Ronan Point in May 1968 and, more substantively over time, with the emergence of a range of structural problems and defects associated with system-building from the early 1970s.

Missing wall ties caused a large brick panel to fall from Geach Tower in Newtown in 1973; in 1974, 16 towers were found to contain High Alumina Cement vulnerable to decay. Continuing concerns led to ‘spidermen’ (or an abseiling survey team if you want to be prosaic) examining every remaining high-rise in 1985. It was concluded that ‘over 216 of the City’s stock of 426 multi-storey blocks’ [required] urgent action’.

The cost of renovation has been a further significant factor in the Council’s decision to demolish some blocks. Other blocks have been adapted, however, a process begun in 1979 when Brandwood and Cocksmoor Houses in King’s Heath were adapted as sheltered housing. On the Bromford Estate, seven blocks have been rased and two have been adapted to provide warden-serviced accommodation for the elderly. In the other five, according to a local youth worker: (7)

They’re a lovely mix of folk with mental health problems, drug addicts, alcoholism or all three; with single parents, young families, single people who might be divorced, generally unemployed; some asylum seekers.

We’ll let the tone stand – it’s clearly a difficult environment and it’s the difficulty we should acknowledge: the job that we ask social housing to do whilst at the same time denigrating it and many of our most vulnerable fellow-citizens.

At the national level, the turn from high-rise was marked by the ending of the high-rise subsidy in 1967, the White Paper ‘Old Houses into New Homes’ of the following year, and the 1969 Housing Act which prioritised reconditioning of older properties through its creation of General Improvement Areas and Housing Action Areas.

Never a place to do something by halves, Birmingham would now embrace this new rehabilitation drive: in 1972, the Council designated 62 General Improvement Areas, containing 68,000 homes, and 28 Housing Action Areas containing a further 15,000 homes.

Barry Jackson Tower, Newtown – currently scheduled for demolition

For all the problems, the abiding impression given by Birmingham’s continually evolving housing programme is of its ambition and its idealism – sometimes misplaced, occasionally diverted but rooted in a belief in local government’s duty to decently house its people.

Birmingham City Council remains the UK’s largest social landlord with 65,000 homes – around 17 per cent of the city’s total. In 1977, the council house waiting list had fallen to 11,500. Today it stands at around 26,000. For that reason, two of the eight tower blocks scheduled for demolition in 2011 have been reprieved – against tenant opposition, it should be said. (8)

That is the rock and the hard place between which local government is caught and its plight will be made immeasurably more difficult by the policies of the new Conservative government. You can forgive some nostalgia for the buccaneering days of 1960s.

Sources

(1) Anthony Sutcliffe, ‘7. A Century of Flats in Birmingham, 1875-1973’ from Sutcliffe (ed) Multi-Storey Living: the British Working-Class Experience (1974)

(2) The statistic, the verse and the quotation which follows are included in Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal: Public Sector High-Rise Housing in Britain 1945-2002, with Special Reference to Birmingham’, PhD thesis, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Birmingham, 2003

(3) See chapters 30, 32 and 33 in Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block – Modern Public Housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland (1994)

(4) Carl Chinn, Homes for the People. 100 Years of Council Housing in Birmingham (1991)

(5) See High-Rise in the Block Capital Project on-line and their publication, Living in the Sky: a History of High-Rise Council Flats in the Black Country (2015)

(6) Phil Ian Jones, ‘The Rise and Fall of The Multi-Storey Ideal’ on the redesign and ‘ASBO Threat to City Toddlers’, Birmingham Mail, 17 October 2005 on continuing anti-social behaviour.

(7) On the Bromford Estate, see Martin Crookston, Garden Suburbs of Tomorrow? A New Future for the Cottage Estates (2014)